Staff

ODAC Newsletter – Aug 27

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Cairn Energy announced this week that it had found evidence “indicative of an active hydrocarbon system” off Greenland. The news comes in the middle of a bidding round for oil and gas exploration licences there. The US Geological Survey estimated in 2008 that the region contains approximately 90 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil, but producing the stuff would combine the extreme challenges of deepwater drilling, extreme cold, and ice. Any accident would be massively harder to deal with than Deepwater Horizon because of the country’s remoteness…

Plotting the coming oil shock

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A study based on the Hubbert model of peak oil suggests a coming global oil shock may begin as early as 2014 – which ties in with the timeline suggested in a variety of other reports and statements. Despite getting a showing online, and in the occasional business report, [peak oil is] yet to break into the mainstream media. I recently considered three major energy reports published so far in 2010 which take a number of different views on the issue.

Ponzi Schemes: Legal and Illegal

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For there is no illusion that as a nation we are not in fact borrowing on the future, on wealth not yet created, on profits for work not yet begun, to finance national and personal debts (these debts, clearly, are the simple product of costs exceeding revenue, what a contractor might refer to as a “goose-egg.”). The principle difference, though, is that so enshrined in our institutions is the promise of future growth, that spending its downpayment in not only entirely lawful, it has come to be seen as a political and economic imperative

Deconstructing Dinner: Climate Friendly Eating (Conscientious Cooks VIII)

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On this part 8 of our Conscientious Cooks series, we listen in on a really interesting panel discussion hosted in 2008 by the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture (or CUESA) located in San Francisco, California. The panel was themed around the concept of Climate Friendly Eating.

The care and feeding of time machines

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The backyard organic gardens central to the current series of posts on The Archdruid Report — and equally central to most strategies for relocation in the face of looming energy shortages — have a lot of work to do in the period between the last frosts of spring and the first frosts of fall. Stretching that interval, by way of “time machines” drawn from appropriate technology, can help make growing part of one’s own food a more viable proposition.

Biodiesel, biochar & biodiversity in Costa Rica: An example of small-scale, locally-appropriate action

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As global change related to resource depletion and climate change becomes increasingly severe, the ineffectiveness of world governments as well as mainstream environmental organizations and movements is obvious…Instead of relying on these approaches, it seems the safest and most secure adaptive route is the introduction of decentralized, local alternative energy and environmental solutions.

Reviving anarchy for the sake of sustainability

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One thing that fascinates me about political theorist Murray Bookchin’s writing is how prescient it is. His essay, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” was written in 1965, six years before Earth Day, and almost a half-century before now. Yet its content is as relevant as ever, if not more so, given society’s increasing interest in all things “green.” Bookchin even references future ramifications of climate change, long before many had even considered it.

There is something you can do better than any other (Day 141) August 16th

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I start my day late after a much needed lie in and finally come downstairs and start my blog catch up; I have had no opportunity these past few days to get near either internet, or time to myself to write, and now I have both. The sign above the desk reads “Be yourself. There is something you can do better than any other. Listen to the inward voice and follow that” A transition saying indeed; one the Big Society should perhaps adopt.

Brother, can you spare a paradigm?

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I’ve had a bee in my bonnet for a while now about the need for a paradigm shift. This began when I came up with the title for a paper: ‘Let’s Twist Again: Time for a Real Copernican Revolution’. Don’t worry, this is the sort of party game academics get up to – yes really! My own favourite is ‘Haydn Sikh: The Adaptation of the Classical Form in Britain’s Minority Religious Communities’, or something like that.

Heinberg on peak oil and economic growth & Montpelier’s Village-building Convergence

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Author Richard Heinberg’s nine books include The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies and Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines. He discusses what we know about peak oil, as well as its connection to the end of economic growth.